How do you stop Blender from looking for an image texture?
if the textuures are really not used, you can find them in the outliner &gt; orphan data

they are &quot;orphan&quot; because they have no object or anything that uses them (quite an amazing naming scheme hahaha)
Then you will find a &quot;purge&quot; button,
this will &quot;purge&quot; or remove all the orphans (sounds wrong I know)

Then, all of the unused materials will be removed from the blend.file
or you can do this to, go to file &gt; clean up &gt; and remove all unused data blocks